Trying and Failing to be Ethical in Papers, Please

The first time I played Papers, Please, I barely made it to day 5 before I was stripped of my job as an inspector. This was partly due to the fact that I had a hard time getting the hang of the mechanics (and therefore couldn’t get through the line fast enough to make the money I needed to survive), but it was also because I tried to approach the game in a “moral” way. I had read Cory Johnson’s blog post before I played the game, so I knew to expect the people who would ask me to bend the rules for them, and I resolved to focus my gameplay on helping those people every chance I got.

The result? Over the course of those 5 days, my bank account was drained by protocol violation fines, my family went from freezing to sick and back to freezing again, and all I had to show for my “good deeds” was a couple of shiny tokens that I only saw at the end of each in-game day. I was disappointed. Weren’t video games that involved so-called ethical dilemmas supposed to encourage you to make the more ethical choice? And shouldn’t that encouragement come in the form of in-game rewards that, you know, allow you to survive past day 5?

Sicart would answer my last question with an unequivocal “No.” When defining the “wicked problems” that he believes are an important foundation of ethical gameplay, he makes it very clear that the player should have no concrete idea of whether the choices they’re making are “right” or “wrong.” He writes that “the evaluation of the outcome by the game system [should] not be communicated to the player in quantized terms. In other words, thou shall not use karma systems in your games.” That means no in-game rewards for me. If I had gotten them, it would have cheapened the experience of grappling with the ethical problems that the game was posing -- at least, that’s what Sicart thinks.

With this in mind, I started another run of the game. I tried to approach the ethical dilemmas how Sicart would have wanted me to -- relying on nothing other than my own moral system, and not expecting any sort of reward. But once again, I couldn’t make it past day 5. Regardless of the decisions that I made when the ethical dilemmas arose, I was simply playing the game too slowly, and I wasn’t making enough money to survive as a result.

So, starting the game a third time, I pushed all thoughts of Sicart’s wicked problems out of my head and focused only on processing paperwork as fast as I possibly could. When the woman who hadn’t seen her son in six months came up to my booth without the proper paperwork, I turned her away instantly. I wasn’t even thinking of the penalty that I would incur if I let her through; I just knew that it would take too long to go through the whole process of interrogating her about her missing paperwork, and I needed to speed things along. In other words, I made the “unethical” decision… but I wasn’t really considering ethics at all when I did.

Why was that the case? Well, when contrasting ethical with more entertainment-oriented gameplay, Sicart writes that ethical gameplay is “a pause. A caesura in the act of play. A hesitation.” For every run of Papers, Please that I played after the first two, I didn’t stop to pause at all. I was frustrated by my repeated failures, so I focused just on achieving maximum efficiency and powering my way through the game. It worked -- I made it past Day 5 -- but I can’t help but feel as though I didn’t play the game as it was intended to be played. Because my primary focus was moving as quickly as possible, I didn’t stop to consider any of the ethical dilemmas that quite literally landed on my inspector’s desk. If a problem was too complicated for me to deal with without holding up the line, I simply rejected the visa without further thought. I was not “morally invested in the decisions taken,” and I did not have any “clear, deep reflection[s] on what the choices are and what ... they mean,” as Sicart suggests someone who encounters a well-designed ethical problem must. The game just moved too quickly for any of that.

The only time I did feel as though I truly experienced one of Sicart’s wicked problems in Papers, Please was when a man from the EZIC cult tried to bribe me with $1000 to let his agents into the country. What made this instance different from all of the other ethical dilemmas in the game? Simple: it happened at the end of one of the in-game days, where the player is free to linger on the budgeting screen for as long as he or she wishes. There’s no pressure to advance as quickly as possible, and there’s no in-game timer to worry about. There’s just you, the bribe, and the checkbox that you can use to either accept or deny it.

I ended up denying the bribe. And, in doing so, I felt as though I was making my first real choice in the game. I paused to think, I referenced my own values, and I made a choice that I was morally invested in. These were all things I simply couldn’t do when I was playing through one of the days and under the pressure of a time constraint. Perhaps you could argue that someone who was better at the game than me would be able to give the daytime ethical dilemmas the consideration that they deserve, but it’s a sign of poor design if you have to have any sort of skill level with a game in order to experience the ethical choices properly. Such things should be accessible to all players if a game is to truly produce ethical gameplay as Sicart describes it.

It must be noted that this design flaw may be an intentional one. What if the designers intended you to have to play the game multiple times in order to get the hang of the mechanics, failing over and over again when you took too long or made too many ethical choices, so that you eventually felt frustrated enough to abandon your own morals? This wouldn’t be totally unrelated to the game’s content -- after all, it is about an immigration checkpoint, so a situation like this may be commenting on how the monotony and dismal working conditions of the job foster unfeeling indifference in those who work as immigration officers in real life. Even in this case, though, the game still fails to create true wicked problems; the only difference is that this failure would be an intentional part of the game’s message.

In the end, although Papers, Please undoubtedly makes a valiant effort to engage in ethical gameplay, it falls short of actually achieving it. Some of the wicked problems it presents are well-formed, but the vast majority are not. The game offers an entertaining experience regardless, but in order to achieve what Sicart has outlined, its mechanics may need just a bit of tweaking.